Google Drive setup

Using Google Drive as the bridge between the iPad you draw on and the PC you render on.

Drive for desktop behaves like a mounted disk

Install Google Drive for desktop on Windows and sign in. It appears in Explorer as its own drive letter — as if you had plugged in a very large USB stick — and everything under it behaves like ordinary files.

That is what makes the whole arrangement work: Platemaker needs no cloud integration of any kind. It opens paths on a drive letter, and Drive takes care of the rest.

The drive letter matters

A change of drive letter invalidates the entire workspace.

A workspace stores absolute paths to every input and output file. If Drive mounts as G: today and something else tomorrow, every one of those paths breaks at once and the whole project shows as missing.

Pin the letter in Drive's settings and leave it alone. If it does change, the fix is to point the project at the files again rather than to repair the file by hand.

→ File statuses, Workspace on Drive

Localised folder names

On a non-English account the top-level folder is localised — Mój dysk rather than My Drive on a Polish account. This is fine: non-ASCII paths are fully supported.

It is worth knowing only because it used to break things. Before libplatemaker 0.2.1 a workspace under such a path could be saved but not reopened, which looked like a Drive restriction and was really path encoding. See Troubleshooting.

Folder structure

Your choice entirely. Platemaker imposes no layout — it stores full paths to whatever files you point it at, wherever they are, and nothing needs to sit in any particular relationship to anything else.

Pick a convention that suits how you work and stay consistent with it, so that the paths stored in the workspace stay valid.

What to keep out of Drive

Nothing in particular. There is no category of file that causes trouble by being synced.

The one thing worth deciding is whether rendered output belongs in the cloud at all — see Workspace on Drive.

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See also: Workspace on Drive · Comic production · Troubleshooting